Personal spaceflight

Space tourism is space travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. To date only orbital space tourism has taken place provided by the Russian Space Agency, although work continues developing sub-orbital space tourism vehicles by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. In addition, SpaceX announced in 2017 that they are planning on sending two space tourists on a lunar free return trajectory in 2018 aboard their Dragon V2 spacecraft launched by the Falcon Heavy rocket.

The publicized price for flights brokered by Space Adventures to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft have been US $20–40 million, during the period 2001–2009 when 7 space tourists made 8 space flights. Some space tourists have signed contracts with third parties to conduct certain research activities while in orbit.

Russia halted orbital space tourism in 2010 due to the increase in the International Space Station crew size, using the seats for expedition crews that would have been sold to paying spaceflight participants. Orbital tourist flights were set to resume in 2015 but one planned was postponed indefinitely and none have occurred since 2009.

As an alternative term to "tourism", some organizations such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation use the term "personal spaceflight". The Citizens in Space project uses the term "citizen space exploration".

The Soviet space program was aggressive in broadening the pool of cosmonauts. The Soviet Intercosmos program included cosmonauts selected from Warsaw Pact members (from Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania) and later from allies of the USSR (Cuba, Mongolia, Vietnam) and non-aligned countries (India, Syria, Afghanistan). Most of these cosmonauts received full training for their missions and were treated as equals, but especially after the Mir program began, were generally given shorter flights than Soviet cosmonauts. The European Space Agency (ESA) took advantage of the program as well.

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